


instructions unclear, grasping frond stuck in rotating air disturber device

by oncewewerezombies



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, Alternian Empire, Anxiety, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, IN SPACE!, Pale Porn, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, References to Canon-Typical Violence, Self-Doubt, Subjuggulator Gamzee, Subjuggulators, Threshecutioner Karkat, body art, clown bullshit, decoration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-08
Updated: 2017-11-08
Packaged: 2019-01-31 02:23:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12666348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oncewewerezombies/pseuds/oncewewerezombies
Summary: Be KARKAT VANTAS==> Survive Ascension despite filthy mutant hemotype==> Be sweet kick ass Threshecutioner==> Have Subjuggulator moirail who requires your assistance with article of faith==> Panic





	instructions unclear, grasping frond stuck in rotating air disturber device

"Chucklefuck, open _up_."

You chafe at the fucking delay as the door doesn't open immediately to your terse command, knowing that for some reason your moirail is in there and he's shut you out. You're fucking concerned, ok? You hauled his chirpbeast-scarer rack of bones down to the mediculler, after he took that hit that had honestly scared you shitless. Not that you'd let anyone know, except for him, how close honestly had come to literally. You'd thought that he was going to die. Right then and fucking there, right in front of you, spawning your never ending revenge cycle against the alien refuse who'd taken his life just like Troll Inigio Montoya avenging the sudden and abrupt culling of his mentor by the seemingly suave and urbane, secret mutant who had six fingers instead of five. Great movie, by the way, you fucking love the shit out of Troll Princess Bride. 

Doesn't help you get into your moirail's respiteblock though. 

Dread Gamblignant Roberts never had to deal with this.

You fulminate, consider what the fuck you're going to do about this _rank outrage_ \- and bang your fist down harder on the entry portal's closed access swirl. This moronic fucking nookscrape of a clown - if you didn't feel this outrageously blinding rush of fucking pity every time you let your oculars rest on his stupid, dopey face with its coating of repulsive mirthful paint - you wouldn't be here at all. But you do, all fates fucking help you, you _do_ , it's like some kind of hideous disease that's infected every chamber of your pusher, and here you are. Despite all your better fucking sense. If you were any sort of smart, you wouldn't have quadranted anything to a fucking subjuggulator. Yet here the fuck you are. You've always been lacking in survival instinct.

"GAMZEE. FUCKING. MAKARA. This is your moirail speaking, _and you should think it's the fucking voice of God reborn, you suppurating asshole, open your damn portal-_ " You don't let up on banging on the door, even though other ones down the ship's corridor have started to _swish_ open in a soft hum of swirling planular fans. Asshole. If he doesn't open up soon, someone's like to cull you for being a Public Lowblooded Nuisance or a Lowblood In Public Alone Among Subjuggulators (both actual charges that would stand up in any court of law as a defence for untimely culling, Terezi had informed you with sharp-fanged legal glee because she's a witch who wants to play windchimes on your bones and is forever disappointed that you haven't been culled yet so she can make her One Of A Kind Mutant Windchimes) and he doesn't put you in danger like this. Not on purpose. But you're getting into this room, one way or another, even if you agitate one of the other slobbering chucklefucks to throw you straight through the aperture of the oscillating iris of Gamzee's entry portal. Pan first. Dead. Then, by Gl'bgolyb's festering cloaca, you will rise from the dead by the power of _sheer fucking spite_ to rail against him for the inconvenience.

The door opens - _finally_ \- and you step inside before you get loudly noticed for one of the aforementioned offences against law, order and Alternian cultural mores, and one of your moirail's peers fucking culls you where you stand.

He has the top of his uniform pulled up to the slope of his sniffnode, covering the lower part of his face. Bandaged arm all fucking akimbo and sticking out from underneath, where he hasn't pulled the thing on properly. One sleeve flapping in the breeze. You boggle for a moment, because as stupid as your moirail is and has been since he was hatched, you can't figure out how he managed to fuck up putting on a shirt at this age. You're both well past pupation. And he's fucking well _over_ his sopor addiction - if he ever, _ever_ picks that back up again - your mind flashes back to the nights and days of misery as he puked and cried and begged you, begged like you'd never heard anyone beg for anything, for one bite of sopor. He'd sweated more than Zahhak could even hope to aspire to and pissed himself and it had been so _fucking miserable_ for both of you, but it had gotten dangerous for him when his core temp rose high enough that he'd been having febrile convulsions. You'd though he was going to die and that you'd culled him before the drones could get to it. Something of that momentary gutclenching fear must show on your face, because he grabs you by the upper arm.

"Chill," he rasps, and it's muffled by his shirt. You are going to...shit. First you have to find out what is going on in that disturbed mote he calls a brain, rattling around the inside of his thinkpan, and then maybe you can figure it out. If you just leaap in there, you might make it worse. It had taken a long fucking time (god, Past You was a globefondling scream machine who didn't know shit from grubsauce) to get to know that shrieking yourself hoarse at every obstacle wasn't a cure-all solution. Most things, yes. Not everything. What a sad unfortunate night it had been when you had found that out - it was so much easier just to scream. Doing other things required work. Effort. But once you'd had that epiphany you'd known you'd have to change how you did things _or you were going to fucking die_. Once you're off the planet, you're not just some wiggler fondling his shameglobes in furious self-humiliation anymore. 

You've managed to reorient yourself to put that kind of shoulder behind the circulatory travel-mechanism, at least. It's probably one of the things that's kept you alive. That, and the moirallegiance you have with a budding subjuggulator who is also the obvious descendent of their greatest, biggest Grand Highblood they've ever had. They have a different one now, but apparently the clown corps as a whole were too superstitious to off him _or you_ despite your hideous blood and his fumbling idiocy, which you are seethingly grateful for. It'd be nice if someone could appreciate you for your talents, instead of your relationships but since this is what keeps your breath going inside your noisome husk, you'll take it.

"Do not fucking tell me to chill, you piece of shit, do you know how _long_ you left me out in that public ambulatory passage?" you hiss, more out of fear than you want to admit and get closer to your gangling clown of a moirail. He skitters backwards, and you frown and then stomp closer again, until you've pretty much backed him into a wall. "You look like more of an idiot than usual, I didn't realise that breaking your grasperhinge would mean that you'd become unable to put on your clothes properly," you snipe, and try to figure out what else is wrong. For right now, you hold off touching him. The depths of simpering concern you'll descend to when your chucklefuck of a moirail hurts himself never ceases to astonish you.

You cock your head and consider him. Horns in one piece, check. For once, the shameless fondling nookwhiff, he's got clothes on even if he's fucked up the top. His eyes look at you, big and wide as a grub. Wider, even. Baby hoofbeast wide. It would be adorable, if it wasn't anxiety-prone nauseating. 

"Where's your _paint?_ " You don't even recognise your own voice, it's so hushed. Gamzee doesn't go without his paint. Even when he'd been out of his pan on sopor withdrawal, you'd never seen his face _completely_ bare. You've been moirails for _fucking forever_ and look, ok. You fucking tweak him about his fakey fake clowngods and his bullshit religion, _regularly_ , he needs someone who'll do that for him. But he always has his paint on. You could count the times you've seen him with it even smeared into something unrecognisable on one grasper. 

"Ain't got it on," he murmurs back, quiet as the church never was. Just sometimes, Gamzee'll go whispery quiet like his voice is choked up back in his chirpbox and can't quite struggle out, and it always makes you feel like you're on shaky ground. It feels more like him when he's louder, as though he's not holding himself back.Why should he be afraid of you, you're his _fucking moirail_. 

But sweeps of empty beach is a lot to fucking struggle against. There's not much you can do except show him, again and again afucking-gain when you'd rather claw your sight nuggets staight out of your fucking skull with the weak prising that your frond-stubs could no doubt bring to the nutritional plateau, slow and _fucking_ laborious, that you're not going to leave him. That you're here for good, no matter what. Even when he fucks up. Especially when he fucks up. You won't _leave_ him. You'll never leave. You've never felt about anybody like you do about _Gamzee_ fucking I eat sopor and my lusus was a failure clown dipshit _Makara_. 

And you know you never will.

"Come on." You don't try to coax him to drop the sweater yet, just pet and fuss at his horns and his long, slightly frilled ears where they poke out over the rolled neck where he's got it stretched over his face. Purplebloods. Not quite one, not completely the other. And they called you a fucking mutant. You know better than to make your views on the fucking matter known. You're only a little thrillseeking - you're not feeling suicidal. There are a _lot_ of very mirthful clowns around you right now. You're not going to be _overtly_ subversive. More than what you're carrying around _inside your actual veins_ and you'd prefer it not wildly splattered on clicks of corridor walls. Outside your body. Because you're dead. Everyone got that? Everyone understand that minor fucking point? Thank you, you're sure everyone in the audience will clap wildly at this imaginary third party's sudden grasp of undeserved comprehension. Fuck, even when you're talking to yourself, your brain is still an asshole.

You are. _Surrounded_. By assholes. It's almost a functioning corollary of your existence - Be Karkat Vantas, Surrounded By Assholes...Survive.

"Come on, Gamzee. It's ok." You pet and stroke and soothe. Sometimes you can scream at him, and he laughs and tries to bend your mood around to something more cheerful. This isn't one of those fucking times. He is well fucking spooked, and you know it's about his paint - you don't understand why he doesn't just take himself to the viewing surface in the ablutions chamber and rectify the situation like the giant, grown up assclown he is. "Talk to me. I can't do _anything_ , if _you don't talk to me, nookwhiff, I swear to fucking-_ "

"I can't do my paint."

His statement comes out hurried and hurt, and your hands pause in their Empress appointed work. He fucking can't _what?_

"I can't - A brother means to say as such as they tried but -"

"Shut up. Just. Shhh." Your hands keep papping, and you let yourself digest the dribble that he'd vomited up for the moment. Gamzee can't do his paint. Figures, considering how badly he'd broken his frond. It had been a fucking nasty snap, the mediculler hadn't been impressed but you'd been internally screaming at the look on the internal slicescreen shot. The snap. The jagged break in his arm. Fuck. You don't really want to think about, or you're going to puke right now on his humorously large shoes. "It's ok, we'll work it out-"

"Ain't no _making this right_ , bro," he says, and you press your thumbs deeper into his cheeks through the edge of the sweater and shush him. When his voice gets all wavery like that, it's a sign that shit is about to go down. You don't even wait for his eyes to go red now. Once upon a long fucking time ago, you'd been convinced that he didn't feel rage, that he was as mellow as his up and down letters and lazy bros and sisters made him sound. You had been hilariously, terribly wrong. " _Can't even up and DO MY FUCKING PAINT-_ "

He's got that keen in his voice rising up that makes a shudder race down your vertical columnar support, and you pap him briskly. Snap him right the fuck out of it with your own, your poor little incapable fronds, the way you've always been able to do for him. Fuck knows why it worked the first time, fuck if you know why it keeps working. One of life's eternal mysteries, such as what could possibly be living in the depths of Gamzee's hair. Something, that's all you know and yet, you still pile with him.

"Don't start on me with _that_ , fuckface, I'm not in the mood," you say as pleasantly as you can. It's not very pleasant at all, but he shudders and subsides. Like something about the insult, your snapturtle worthy attitude, makes him comfortable and at ease. You don't know _why_ , and it's this frustrated little nugget of WHY in your soul, but you'd never give it up. Not ever. You'd kill someone for him, no questions even fucking required, let alone asked. 

A terrible, horrible idea strikes you and your hands pause for a moment. He grumble-groans somewhere deep in his chest, and you return to your quadrant-mandated duties of shooshing. He'd do the same for you, but he's the one teetering on the handle right now, and his rages, well. You'd thought highblood rages were pure fucking bullshit, an excuse to allow higher, cooler trolls to throw tantrums and get away with them, no matter the property damage - _until you saw an actual highblood rage_. You'd gotten out unscathed, albeit with a certain dampness in your drawers; a few of your schoolfeeding group hadn't. 

"What if -" What you're about to ask is probably fucking blasphemous, but if you don't he's just going to wind himself tighter and tighter and _tighter_ \- "What if, just hear me out here, nookmunch." You take a breath. If you're going to have a chance of getting him to agree to this, you can't just fly off the handle. Cool. Calm. Collected. All of those skills you are so fucking known for, how are you fooling anybody with this shit? "What if _I_ did your make up? Oh fucking excuse me - _your sacred paint_."

It can't be that hard. He'd been painting himself nightly even when he was fucking himself over on sopor. You're sure you can do it, like you don't know what your moirail is meant to _look like_ -

"Think about it, Gamzee, it's probably the best way to do it, unless-" you want me to go get one of your fucking _brothers_ or _sisters_ , was what you'd been about to say but he's already cutting you off. God. You're so fucked in the pan over this douchefuck, it's fucking disgraceful. 

"That's a good fucking idea, bro."

He looks almost blissed peaceful - you didn't think you'd been papping him _that_ hard, what the fuck is up with that look? You muster your resources to try again, because what if your idea is fucking terrible and he's just saying that shit to what, make you feel better? He would. The fucking slack bulged, sopor-raddled _fool_. 

" _Gamzee._ "

"You do it, best fucking friend." He leans down, you can almost feel his too long bones creaking as he bends down to your height to get his face closer to the palm of your hands. He's that odd mixed of bashful and shameless that you think of as your moirail's perfect state of being as he pulls the mask of his collar down. Bares his face. To you, Karkat fucking Vantas. He's hollow cheeked and long faced, all those homely planes that you know are never going to grace any fucking cover of Troll Vogue, no matter how long and handsome his horns, and god. God, _fuck_. You're speechless. This is something so precious that they don't even show it in _romcoms_. It's so rare, it's not even a _trope_. "I got a trust in you, as means you'll do it right. Got faith."

No, this was stupid - this whole thing was _so fucking stupid_ , what were you _thinking_ \- you can't do his paint. You're a fucking _mutant_ , you should be culled, you should have been culled already, when you first approached the platforms for Ascension, or in some drive-by highblood firebombing of your grubburb. What the fuck had you been thinking in the smear of rotted nookslime that you call a brain when you came up with this soggy-diapered shit of a terrible fucking idea? 

"Ok. Ok, I'll. I'll do it."

Somewhere without taking heed of what was going on in your thinkpan, your chirpblister answered for you. Fucking thing. Always coming out with shit you're not sure you mean, or maybe you do mean it but you hadn't meant to _say_ it. It's gotten you into some fucking strifes in your life - and out of them.

Gamzee just nods, like he hadn't expected any other fucking answer except the one where you help him (with his paint, his fucking _paint_ , hot fucking shit) and turns you both towards his ablution chamber, pulling you along with him under the pressure of his remaining good grasping frond. This fucker. He's lucky you're so pale for him, or you'd snap this one off at the hinge too. Fuck. No, don't think about it. 

At least he hadn't been bleeding. Small fucking mercies, but it was still one. You'd just had to see your moirail's bones moving around under the skin - obviously broken and wrong and - fuck, you're going to evacuate your hungersack if you keep thinking about it. He's fixed now, or at least he's all set to heal. It's a good thing he's a subjuggulator. You don't think it that often, but you're pretty sure anyone lower than him would have been culled by now, for sheer fucking stupidity if nothing else.

You trail along with him dumbly, struck speechless still and let him pull you in to stand with him near the miniablution trap, and seats himself all regal on the edge of the main trap. Your hands run over each other as he pulls out the gray and white paint that he regularly uses, and a little tin of black. Fuck. Oh god fucking shitballs. Now you have to _do_ this. He's got the paintbrushes, and a little smeared-on rag, and he sets everything up where you can reach it and still reach him in the cramped little hygiene block you both share. Even trainee subjuggulators had some restrictions on their privileges. Still, at least you can share a respiteblock. It's pretty nice. Even if he snores.

"Right so - how do I start," you say through numb lips, tongue feeling heavy in your mouth. There's a lot of things you'll dive face first into for the glory of the Empire, sickles out and ready to make thin sliced finbeast pieces out of whatever obstacle is in front of you but this is important. And it's not that it's important to you, it's that it's important to _Gamzee_. You can't fuck this up like you've fucked up almost every part of your miserable, freakish existence. That's probably misplaced nomenclature. To say it was a life would be to suggest it had meaning. You're pretty sure you're just a dingleberry hanging off the asshairs of some feculent musclebeast, vapidly butlering its way through the void. No meaning. No reason. You're just there. Useless and disgusting, a fragment of waste.

"Take the white and just slather it all over my whole nug, brother," he says, and he sounds blissful. Like he can't fucking think of anywhere he'd rather be then here and with you, with you about to fuck up his religion in ways that you don't mean and shit - shit - what would the other subjuggulators think? Are they going to think you've tainted him in some way? Is this some sort of blasphemy? It's not like you really know enough about the inner workings of his bullshit religion to be sure! You're pretty sure you're not even meant to know as much as you _do_ ; Gamzee is just really shitty at keeping secrets. "Just all over, you know, like all the way to the hair and around here," he says and uses his good arm to draw a circle that pretty much covers his whole face but doesn't go anywhere near his neck.

"...are you _sure?_ " you ask suspiciously because you know his 'face' is not all white. It's not like you haven't been looking at it pretty regularly since you were both six. Fuck. Had it really been that long ago, when you'd first met face to face? You're both about nine sweeps now, proper fully functioning fucking adults but - shit. You wonder what it's going to be like when you're both older. Whatever, it's not like you're not still going to be looking at this idiot and feeling this overwhelming surge to take care of him, like rising bile in your windchute coming straight up from your acidbox. 

"Gotta start from the ground up, Karbro. Means all white t'start." His large hand comes out and lands on your cheek and you squawk and startle, flailing at him. You don't need to be _papped!_ You're fucking fine. Your inner turmoil is no fucking maelstrom, it is a peaceful fucking _pool_ \- he doesn't need to start with that time-wasting shit of papping you. "Be chill, motherfucker. A wicked ninja can sure as fuck meander you all the way through this sacred motherfucking art."

"It's not an art," you say in a disparaging tone instantly. Still you pick up the white paint and the round white brush that he points out before getting closer. Swallow, take a breath, and start brushing the cool stuff onto his skin. His eyes are closed while you do it, he looks fucking serene. Pushing the thick curls of hair back, you coat him from the forehead down with this greasy, disgusting face-tinting lotion. "...all over?" you ask, hesitating with the brush near his eye.

"All over, pale love," he says in that way that makes you feel a shudder race down your spine. He barely cracks an eye open, just enough so you can see purple and yellow, before closing it again. He's letting you - you're so close to so many vulnerable things and of _course_ you've done shit like this in a pile, but this is different. Maybe because it's not _in_ a fucking pile. He's exposing himself to you like this, _and you're not even in a fucking pile together_. He's just so fucking shameless. You have to wonder if it's all clowns that are like this, or just your spectacularly thinkpan fucked one.

You smear the white over his closed eyes, your breath catching in your throat. 

"Alright, got a good coat all over?" he asks, eyes still closed and you don't know how he can be so fucking CALM, this ASSHOLE. 

"Y-yeah." You cough and clear your throat, harrumphing. Fuck your life, you sound like that blueblooded pustule of righteousness on the hide of the Empire. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm...done."

"Pick up that lil medium sized brush -" Both little _and_ medium sized, what the fuck does that _mean_ \- "with the angled edge," your moirail directs you to next and oh. Obviously it's that brush. You pick it up, holding it carefully between your frondstubs. "Ok, you got it?"

"Got it," you affirm. Your pusher is trying to escape your fucking thoracic cavity, what the fuck. You don't get this nervous when half the squad has come down with a sudden case of fatality and you've still got most of a quadrant to sweep clean before the shuttle comes and picks you up to take you off-planet. What is _wrong_ with you? It's just paint. It's nothing.

"Ok so now a brother needs to start on doing my oculars first," Gamzee says, completely unphazed while your internal screaming only gets louder. "Then a motherfucker can guide a wicked moonbeam through putting on the details."

" _Don't call me things like that_ ," you snarl. "What if someone hears you, chucklefuck? Can you fucking imagine what that would sound like, can you even imagine the insane fucking lengths to which I would have to go to reestablish what _modicum_ of respect I've managed to claw out of the hideously prejudiced landscape of command that makes up our esteemed Empire?"

"A brother be all kinds of apologies, Karbro." He waits a beat, and grins like he thinks he's so fucking clever. What misshapen god gazed down and decided that this, _this_ heap of sweltering hoofbeast droppings was going to be your destined palemate? Your fated moirail? You want to kick it right in the gonads. "Wait, I almost forgot - you gotta dust me first."

"Dust you."

"Uh huh, that lil bag type thing just there, with the rest of a ninja's shit. Sets the paint, can you gaze at it proper, my palest motherfucker?" He still sounds fucking amused. Probably at you, this _asshole_. How dare he? Which of the pair of you in this moirallegiance is the most well-functioning one again? Oh hey, you're going to point both grasper-stubs right at _yourself_.

"Yeah, _fine_ , the bag of powdery dusty fucking stuff. Just like you pulled it out of some fucking crypt. Now what?"

"Pat it all over my nug."

"Pat it."

Excuse the fuck outta you if you sound disbelieving but if you can remind the imaginary audience, your moirail spent a long time eating sopor. Sopor. Sopor he backed in pie tins and ate with his frondstubs like the example of a degenerate everybody's lusus warned them about - except fuck no, they didn't, _because who was STUPID enough to bake and eat FUCKING sopor_.

"Yeah, brother, gotta got all that powder all over, stop's a motherfucker's paint from smearing," Gamzee explains, and it's, you know, it's almost interesting. You'd probably be interested if this wasn't a stupid fucking clown tradition. And one you weren't about to fuck up.

"Fine, powder you like a wiggler's ass, I _get_ it," you grouse and then puff the little bag all over his face as he laughs at you. The powder gets in his facegash and up his sniffnode and he coughs, and you feel a little bit of guilty enjoyment out of that. "Next?"

So far, you haven't fucked up and you're cautiously enjoying that fact. Not that he's asked much of you so far; smear one colour all over his face, dust him by smacking him in the nug with a powderball thing. Nothing too hard. The tricky shit is coming up next.

"Ok, get that paint smearer-stick as a brother pointed out the last time," Gamzee says, with the smooth tones of someone who has continuing faith. You guess if he can believe in his fakey bullshit clowngods for so long, without any actual proof as to their existence, you can't really blame him for believing in your competence. At some points in your life, you've managed to stumble your way into occasional displays of brilliance. That's more than his fucking ridiculous Messiahs have ever managed in terms of proof of their existence and ability to affect reality. Miracles your festering stuffed up shameglobe. "And now you wanna do a triangle, right around an ocular."

To demonstrate, as though you didn't know what a triangle was, he draws one with the tip of a claw on his good hand around his eye.

This. Fucking. Asshole.

"I know what a _fucking triangle_ is," you seethe, and settle in to paint the shape around Gamzee's eye, dipping the brush into the pot and wiping it carefully against the edge to clear out the excess so you can get a clear line. You're not entirely stupid - just mostly. He closes them. He trusts you so fucking much it hurts. Why does he trust you? Why doesn't he realise that you're an entirely unpitiful pile of failure and just - move on? You don't know why. You bite and snipe and snarl. You call him names. And he just stays and looks at you with diamonds in his eyes that anybody could fucking just see, if they saw him in the right moment. 

You don't know what you've ever done to deserve anybody looking at you that way.

"And then the next one," he says helpfully, when you've finished painting in a lop-sided triangle. It doesn't look right. Fuck you, fuck your fucking unsteady unartistic frond-nubs, _fuck your nookblistering acidwash of a thinkpan that came up with the idea of you doing this in the first place_. "C'mon, brother, I believe in you."

"Good thing one of us does," you mutter, and duplicate your piss-poor attempt on the skin around his other eye. It's a lopsided attempt at symmetry, and honestly you kind of want to die. You can't let him go outside like this - but you can't stop either. He'd be so fucking disappointed. You couldn't bear it. You have to finish this. "Uh-"

"Facegash, you gotta use the real motherfucking pointy one," your moirail says, still in that taint-chafing helpful tone. You heave a sigh, and pick it up, the one it is being obvious enough. He's really good at explaining things in simple terms - you don't know quite how to take it. If you have to be honest. "C'mon, bro, you just gotta do a real big smile. And then just a few more lil shapes, you almost fucking done, you're doing so motherfucking mirac-"

" _Stop_ , right there, or I swear by the Empress's glacial _nook_ , I will reach into your cavernous, stupidity resounding maw, pull out your tongue and wrap it around your head like a pretty fucking _bow_." You take a deep breath, and for some reason, your minor explosion of anger has made your hands stop shaking. You are going to paint his face and cull it, cull it like it was a miserable alien wiggler on invasion day. If you thought, for a moment, that he'd provoked you on purpose so your incoherent rage would burn up your anxiety, you - well, fuck. You don't know. 

You settle in to painting the biggest fucking smile you can. It's ridiculous. You bet that Gamzee is going to love it.

Once the smile's in place, it's mostly all the fuck over, _thank fuck_. You dab in a few diamonds, on the tip of his sniffnode and at the tips of his smile on his cheeks, and you are finally. _Finally_. Done. Thank the mercy of the Empress's frozen nook and all hail her beneficent bulge.

It...looks pretty bad. You think so, anyway. You didn't realise how much effort it must take for Gamzee to paint on the same face every night, the way he has for sweeps. Even before you met him on Troll Omegle, you're pretty sure he still had his shitty clown faith and painted on a mirthful mask. Every twilight. 

You can't think of a single fucking thing you'd care about to do voluntarily every fucking evening.

Not the _same_ thing over and over. You like your romcoms, you have your favourite movies - you couldn't think of _one_ you'd voluntarily watch every night for the rest of your life. And you have some real fucking good movies in there. Classics.

"So," you say shortly, trying not to bite at your lip or run your claws up the inside of your wrists. Gamzee gets upset when you do shit like that, even though you never draw blood. You learned better when you were barely a wiggler; you know the heinous colour of the swill swirling through your veins. It should have been a death sentence - you'd expected it to be. Why does he even _talk_ to you, let alone act pale towards you? 

He's looking at himself in the mirror, and all you can see is where you fucked up. The asymmetry. The way the lines aren't straight. Every. Fucking. Thing. That _you've_ fucked up. You're expecting him to grab the cleanser plane and wipe it off, clean his face off and turn around, ask you to do it again. Probably with some beatific parable about how nothing is perfect the first time, and expect you to go through that rambunctiously decorative clown bullshit all over again. You can't think of anything worse. Your fingers twitch, you can feel tremors running up your forearms, down your vertiginous cartilage support column. 

"Looks motherfucking dashing, Karbro," he says with a small smile, and starts unfolding himself to get to his feet like some broken boned creeptastic mannequin that's managed to slip free of its tethers. Usual, for him. You're left speechless with rage in the aftermath of what he said, and how _lackadaisical_ he is over your _fucking failure_ to do something clown wigglers manage on a nightly basis with much more fluency.

You can feel yourself bridling, puffing up from shoulders to the hair on your fucking pan standing on your head, before his hand lands on your cheek and you go soft like a punctured partysack. What, no, that isn't fair - you're meant to be the pacifying one in this relationship.

"Looks like _shit_ ," you manage to spit out sourly, but the look that he gives you says he doesn't see it the same way you do. Guess that's why you're moirails - he sees the things you don't, and vice versa. You both cover the other's weak points, presenting diamond hardness to any outsider who might have found you easy prey alone. Even when the predator stalking the complex interconnecting tunnel system is you, and all your subconscious fears.

"Looks like miracles, my hotblooded brother," Gamzee sing-songs in this particular asshole tone he uses when he really wants to piss you off but only in a way that'll see you simmer at the most, and uses his good hand to slap you so hard on the back you almost stumble into the sink, just catching yourself. You breath out, sharp and hard, before shaking it off. He knows how to handle you. It's disgusting; you still let yourself be handled. "Let's go out and face up to all those motherfuckers, as they think they know shit. Hey, bro?"

"Yes, _fine_ , you pustular abscess on the hide of trollmanity," you snipe, and then have to frantically try to comb your hair back into place when he ruffles it. His hand almost spans the entirety of your skull - who the fuck let him grow so big? You certainly fucking didn't give permission for any such fucking thing. "Let's go; I can't let you waste away in here. A husk that big requires regular replenishment. You haven't eaten since yestereve when we left the mediculler, I fucking know you."

He bends as you scold him, pressing his forehead against yours. Those long horns would have locked with yours, if you'd had anything worthy of the appellation. Instead, it's a comforting lean against the shallow slope of yours, an easy and familiar pressure. He's so close to purring and you can feel it, it makes you go red across your cheeks like you're embarrassed by him or something. You are. You know you are.

"You got it, bro."

There's a lot of things in your life that aren't easy. They're rewarding, but they're not easy. Watching as Gamzee packs his paints away into their case with the one good grasper he has right now, putting them away with familiar doting care, then ducking his head on the way out of the ablutionblock and then as he turns back to look at you, offers his hand. Pulls you with him. This? With him? In the end, it's always easy.

Honestly, you're so fucking pale for him you could paint the insides of the ship with vomit over how disgustingly maudlin you can get. Just thinking about him. It is absolutely one hundred per cent _vile_.

You wouldn't change one fucking thing.

Wait no. One thing - you wanna be tall. Much, much taller than Fuckstick McClown. God you hate him sometimes - but his hand falls heavy on your shoulder, his broken arm held against his chest by the medistrap. 

Shit. His paint is so fucked up - but he looks happy. That's got to count for something.

"Hurry up, are we going to eat or what?" you snarl, and step out into the public walkway like you fucking own it. "Move your skinny ass, Makara."


End file.
